10 July 2017

On 21 June 2017, Singapore signed the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreements (MCAAs) on the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and the Exchange of Country-by-Country (CbC) Reports, both of which form multilateral framework agreements for bilateral cooperation on Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI).

With the signing, Singapore reaffirms its commitment to abide by the principles for establishing bilateral AEOI relationships for both CRS and CbCR, which are to ensure that AEOI partner has the safeguards needed for the confidentiality of information exchanged and prevent its unauthorised usages as well as full reciprocity with the AEOI partner in terms of information exchanged.

In its press release, the Ministry of Finance also said that Singapore will want to ensure that there is a level playing field among all major financial centres and consider engaging in automatic exchange of financial account information with regional jurisdictions which have the safeguards to ensure the confidentiality of information exchanged, and have similar agreements in place with relevant financial centres.

Signing the MCAAs has also enabled Singapore to efficiently establish a wide network of exchange relationships for the automatic exchange of CbC Reports.

Source: Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), Ministry of Finance (MOF)